Sure, everybody knows that Google was created by Stanford Ph.D. students
Larry Page and Sergey Brin who became gazillionaires. But did you know
that Google's first storage device was cobbled together with LEGO? Or
that Google's first investor wrote a $100,000 check even before the company
officially existed? Or that it has its own "official" Google
dog?

Neatorama presents the Top 10 Neat Facts About Google:

1. Before Google, There Was BackRub

In
1996, graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on a research
project to understand the link structure of the World Wide Web. They're
particularly interested in determining the importance of a given web page
based on its backlinks or how many other web pages link to it (which later
became the concept behind Google's "PageRank" algorithm).

The project was named BackRub (yes, a play on the word "backlink").
You can see an archived
page of BackRub in the Wayback Machine:

2. The Original Google Computer Storage

Larry and Sergey needed large amount of disk space to test their PageRank
algo, but the largest hard disks available at the time were only 4 GB.
So they assembled 10 of these drives together.

While he was an undergrad at Michigan University, Larry had built a programmable
plotter out of LEGO, so it's only natural that he used the colorful bricks
to create Google's
first computer storage!

3. Google's First Investor

Sun
Microsystem co-founder Andy
Bechtolsheim knew a good thing when he saw it. After talking to Larry
and Sergey about Google for 30 minutes, he whipped out his checkbook and
wrote a check for $100,000, made out to "Google, Inc." Problem
was, Google, Inc. hasn't existed yet!

Oh, by the way, the Sun in Sun Microsystem stands for "Stanford
University Network."

4.
Google Garage

Talk about getting lucky tenants. In 1998, Susan Wojcicki rented
her garage to two Stanford students - you know who they are - for
$1,700 a month to help out with the mortgage. That turned out to be a
life-changing decision for Susan - it got her a key early job at Google
which translated to a top executive position later on, introduced a future
husband to her younger sister Anne,
and created a mini cottage industry for the rest
of her family. (Photo: Jack Gruber/USA Today)

In
2006, Google
bought the house which had become a tourist attraction (the busloads
of people who show up to take pictures were so annoying that Google decided
not to publish the address - though ironically, you can still Google
Map it.)

5. Google's First Dog

Despite the Internet's obsession with cats, dogs rule Google. In 1999,
a Leonberger breed named Yoshka
came to work with Google's first VP of Engineering Urs Hölzle and
became the company's
"first" dog. (Photo: Google
Timeline)

If you must know, Leonbergers are big dogs with lionesque mane that look
really majestic. They are, however, useless
as guard dogs because they're much too kind and gentle.

6. Just How Many Servers Does Google Have?

Good question. Nobody outside the company knows, and Google ain't talkin'.
The company's famously secretive when it comes to its data centers (Heck,
no one even knows for sure how many data centers the company has!)

For example, The Dalles or "Googleville" data center in a small
Washington Oregon town, was cloaked
in secrecy:

"No one says the 'G' word," said Diane Sherwood, executive
director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river
from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. "It's a little
bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter."

Recently, Google Fellow Jeff
Dean gave a revealing talk on large-scale computing systems in which
he discussed technical details of a new storage and computation system
called Spanner, which is designed for up to 10
million servers. Skynet, anyone?

7. "Green" Search

All those hardware must use a lot of electricity (indeed, Googleville
data center is calculated to require
about 103 megawatts of electricity - enough to power 82,000 homes
or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington), but just how much
energy do you use when you perform a Google search?

Google calculated that it uses about 1
kJ (0.0003 kWh) of energy to answer the average search query. It's
so efficient that your PC will likely use more energy in the time it takes
to do a Google search.

Photo: Google
Solar Panel Project

To offset its electricity consumption, Google even installed 1.6MW
solar panels on the rooftops of the Googleplex. A total of 9,212 solar
panels generate 4,475 kWh daily, the equivalent of about the amount of
electricity used by 1,000 California homes.

8. Google Trike

I'm sure you're all familiar with Google Street View and the camera-topped
Google Car, but what about all of the interesting places inaccessible
to cars? Enter the Google
Trike, which started as a project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical
Engineer on the Street View team:

"I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View
system after realizing how many interesting places around the world
- ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts
- aren't accessible by car," says Dan. "When I'm riding the
trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it's off to next or
how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can't wait to
see what our users come up with."

Previously on Neatorama: Google
Car Pulled Over by the Cops - Now in Google Street View!

9. I'm Feeling Lucky Costs Google $110 Million a Year

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Google's homepage takes you
straight to the first web page result. Because it bypasses Google's own
search result page, where users are shown ads, the button actually costs
Google around $110 million a year.

You know Larry and Sergey had the view, and I certainly share it,
that it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about
making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google
and about the "I'm Feeling Lucky," is that they remind you
that the people here have personality and that they have interests and
that there is real people.

10. Googlebot, Revealed At Last!

Image: Ben Rathbone

In 2005, Ben Rathbone (then
at Google's Hardware Operations) gave us a glimpse of humanity's future.
I, for one, welcome our new Googlebot
overlord:

Then I pondered the question: what does Google do? The grossly
simplified answer that I came up with is Google connects the world with
the Internet.

It all snapped into place: the idea of a robot, connecting a world
with the Internet, with wires, that connect to big cabinets of computers.
It was not hard then to make the leap to representing the internet as
a world, or globe, made up of pages.